On witch hunts and blood lust

And so it begins....

As you might know, last night Roger Clemens, the highest profile baseball player who was implicated by the Mitchell report for the use of performance enhancing, appeared in an interview on 60 Minutes. The interview was the beginning of any real public efforts by Clemens to clear his name. Yesterday, just prior to the interview being aired, news dropped that Clemens had filed a defamation lawsuit against Brian McNamee, his former trainer and the source of the allegations against him contained within the Mitchell report. Clemens also held a press conference today, and will likely be testifying in Congressional hearings regarding the Mitchell report next week.

As you might imagine, the sports media, which has been all over the story anyhow, has totally pounced now that their are new developments. You might be expecting me to analyze Clemens' statements and pontificate at length about my beliefs regarding Clemens' guilt or innocence. I won't be doing that here. The media has been and will continue to dissect everything coming out, gleaning whatever worthwhile insight they can out of it, and a lot of less than worthwhile insight out of it. I can't pretend to offer much new or special to that discussion. I would suggest though, that if you are truly interested, make sure you've seen the 60 Minutes interview for yourself. I've already heard his statements misrepresented in both directions by various media sources today. The bottom line though is this: If you believed the allegations against Clemens prior to last night's interview, you're going to still believe them after watching the interview. The reverse is also true. There is nothing as of yet in the way of physical evidence linking Clemens to steroids, and so we're basically left to decide which voice we deem more credible in this discussion

What I really want to highlight is that the whole Clemens debate is the chief example of why I become more convinced on an almost daily basis that it was an absolute mistake to name names within the Mitchell report. The stated goal of the Mitchell investigation was to come to grips with the breakdowns that led to the prevalence of steroids in baseball, and to recommend the best course of action for cleaning up the game in the future. Despite the fact that the report has been very prominently on the lips of the media in the weeks since it was released, I can pretty much guarantee you that the average sports fan has zero clue as to what the report had to say regarding those stated goals. I heard one media figure today state that if McNamee's testimony wasn't true, then the report was a waste since the allegations against Clemens were the only real revelations it contained. And it's sad that perception has swung that way.

The truth of the matter is that whether Clemens juiced or not is only relevant as a matter of public curiosity. By itself, the question of whether Clemens is clean neither aids nor detracts from the quest to clean up baseball. However, feeding Clemens' name to the media and to the general public was successful in continuing to fuel and demonstrate the level of blood lust the public at large has on the issue. It seems that to the mob, cleaning up the game going forward isn't enough. We need to identify and retroactively punish the cheaters. Mr. Stevens used the term witch hunt when I made my first post on the Mitchell report, and I agreed that it was an apt term. The unfortunate thing is that the public at large has made it rather clear that they support this particular witch hunt, which means we can expect the media to be a willing accomplice. That puts a huge amount of pressure back on MLB to proceed in a manner that creates an environment in which the game can be cleaned up. While I think that the players could be more cooperative anyhow, the kind of decision-making that the commissioner demonstrated with the Mitchell report is not going to have the union knocking down Selig's door begging to help him clean up the game. It seems clear to me that in this instance, Selig caved to short term whims of the public, at the expense of progress towards the long term good of the game.

The simple fact of the matter is this - baseball will not make significant strides until both the owners and the players can put aside adversarial attitudes on this one issue. For that to happen, the commissioner is going to have to make a conscious decision not to throw players under the bus for their past transgressions. The way the Mitchell report has been handled leaves me serious doubts as to whether he's prepared to do that.